The days after the fisherman encounter blurred into a rhythm that Andy recognized, with a private irony that he shared with no one because there was no one to share it with, as a training montage.

  Every movie about a person getting stronger had one. The Rocky sequence. The kung-fu temple scene. The thirty-second compilation of push-ups and running and eating raw eggs set to music that made the audience feel like they could also get strong if they tried hard enough and had a motivational soundtrack. Andy did not have a soundtrack. What he had was XP, a body that responded to use, and the grim, persistent, slightly obsessive determination of a man who had seen a person with hands and decided that having hands again was the only outcome worth pursuing.

  He hunted insects. The repeatable daily quest of his amphibian existence, refined into something approaching art. Dawn brought the slow ones, cold-bodied arthropods that hadn't warmed up yet, moving through the moss with the drowsy torpor of commuters before coffee. Easy kills. Thonk. Thonk. Thonk. He cleared them the way a lawnmower clears grass: systematically, without malice, without hesitation.

  Midday brought the fast insects, warmed by the sun, clicking across rocks with a speed his frog body found genuinely challenging. These required ambush tactics: The Patience adapted for land, body pressed flat, horn tucked low, waiting. The fast insects yielded better XP (three to five per kill versus one or two for the dawn sluggards), and catching them was sharpening his reflexes.

  [SKILL UPGRADE: CAMOUFLAGE (BASIC)]

  [YOUR SKIN PIGMENTATION CAN NOW ADJUST TO APPROXIMATE SURROUNDING SURFACE COLORS. EFFECTIVENESS: MODERATE. DOES NOT AFFECT HORN LUMINESCENCE.]

  The camouflage arrived on his fourth day on land. His skin could now shift pigmentation to match surfaces: darker on rocks, greener on moss, sandy on dry patches. Not perfect (the horn continued to glow with complete disregard for stealth requirements), but enough to make ambush hunting significantly more effective.

  He was poisonous, too. He hadn't tested it until a predator tested it for him: a salamander-thing, three times his body length, that clamped its jaws around his midsection (deeply unpleasant), held on for two seconds, and then released him with a convulsive spasm suggesting Andy's skin toxin was, from the predator's perspective, roughly equivalent to biting into a habanero dipped in battery acid.

  [TOXIC SKIN: ACTIVATED (DEFENSIVE)]

  [PREDATOR DETERRED. NO SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO YOU.]

  [XP GAINED: +5 (SURVIVAL)]

  "I'm poisonous now," Andy thought, watching the salamander-thing retreat with its mouth opening and closing in the universal expression of "I have made a terrible culinary decision." "Not exactly the quality I was hoping to develop for dating purposes. 'What do you bring to a relationship, Andy?' 'Well, I have a glowing horn and I secrete toxins from my skin.' 'Please stop touching me.' Story of my life. Every life."

  The regeneration was slower but equally useful. His left hind leg, sore since the splits incident, finished healing by the end of the second day:

  [REGENERATION: LEFT HIP FLEXOR: 67%... 78%... 91%... COMPLETE.]

  Regeneration meant injuries were setbacks, not catastrophes. The body would fix itself. Slowly. But it would fix itself, and that changed his risk calculus. He could afford to be bolder. Bolder meant more XP. More XP meant Tier 4.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  [XP: 156/500]

  Evenings brought bigger prey and bigger predators. The transition between day and night was a period of heightened activity where everything was either hunting or being hunted in the golden, fading light.

  Andy hunted during the transition. Larger insects, burrowing grubs, the occasional small amphibian that wandered too close and discovered that the weird horned frog was not to be trifled with. His XP climbed steadily.

  And then he found the grove.

  * * *

  It was inland from the shore, deeper than Andy had ventured, past his moss-and-rock territory into a band of vegetation that smelled of chlorophyll and moisture and the sweet decay of organic material returning to soil.

  The trees were unremarkable. The insects were plentiful. What was not standard, what made Andy stop dead and orient his horn toward the sensation with every ounce of attention he had, was the glow.

  Not his glow. A different glow. Warm, golden-green, emanating from the trees themselves, pulsing with a rhythm his body responded to at a level deeper than his senses. A pull that was not magnetic and not chemical but was, undeniably, real.

  The trees were glowing with life energy.

  Andy walked toward them, slowly, carefully, because glowing things in forests were either very good or very bad. The pull intensified with each step. His skin tingled. His horn, his contractually-obligated-to-glow horn, began to respond, the blue-white shifting toward a warmer hue until it matched the forest's glow. Two colors blending at the edges like watercolors on wet paper. His horn was... attracted to whatever this was. Drawn to it. Responding to it in a way that the rest of his body wasn't.

  His horn was aroused. By a forest.

  Andy chose not to make the joke. He didn't need to. The universe was making it for him.

  [AMBIENT ENERGY DETECTED: LIFE MAGIC (NATURAL)]

  [YOUR HORN IS RESONATING WITH AMBIENT LIFE MAGIC.]

  [ABSORPTION POSSIBLE. ABSORB? Y/N]

  Life magic. The System had a name for it. A recognized mechanic with rules and interactions. And his horn was tuned to it, humming with it, the only part of his body picking up a frequency the rest of him couldn't detect.

  "Yes," Andy thought. "Obviously yes. Every time the System asks me a question about the horn, the answer is yes. I have committed to the horn. The horn and I are in the longest relationship of my life. We are ride-or-die. Absorb the magic."

  [ABSORBING...]

  The golden-green energy flowed into his horn the way water flows into a sponge (the irony of the sponge metaphor was noted and filed), permeating the calcium lattice and settling there with a warmth that was physical and also something more than physical. Vitality. The concentrated essence of whatever force made living things live instead of merely existing. It felt, and he was choosing these words carefully, really, really good. The horn was practically humming. The whole experience was weirdly intimate for something happening between a frog and some trees.

  [LIFE MAGIC AFFINITY: BASIC - ACQUIRED]

  [YOUR HORN CAN NOW STORE AND CHANNEL SMALL AMOUNTS OF LIFE MAGIC. CURRENT CAPACITY: MINIMAL.]

  [LIFE MAGIC APPLICATIONS: HEALING (SELF), PURIFICATION (MINOR), GROWTH ENHANCEMENT (MINOR).]

  [NOTE: LIFE MAGIC AFFINITY IS A PREREQUISITE FOR CERTAIN ADVANCED EVOLUTIONARY PATHS.]

  A prerequisite. Life magic was a key to a door the System refused to label. And the credentials included a horn that could absorb it.

  The unicorn path. Every breadcrumb pointed the same direction: a mythic creature combining a horn with life magic with an equine body plan. The System was building prerequisites one tier at a time.

  "Life magic and a horn," he thought, standing in the glow, his horn warm and full and a slightly different color than five minutes ago. "Next I need the equine body. Then whatever Tier 5 requires. Then Tier 6 and the chain completes. Horn plus magic plus horse equals unicorn. Horn plus magic plus horse equals unicorn. I'm going to keep saying it until it happens."

  He stayed in the grove for a long time, absorbing in incremental pulses, his horn growing warmer, the blue-white shifting by degrees toward something more golden.

  [XP: 203/500]

  The life magic seeped into the rest of him too. A background warmth that made his regeneration faster, his senses sharper. For the first time, his amphibian form felt less like a vehicle he was driving from the inside and more like a body he was actually inhabiting.

  Three hundred more XP. Tier 4 would be mammalian. Mammals led to equines. Equines plus horn plus life magic led to unicorn.

  He was getting closer. The horn glowed golden-blue in the magical grove, and Andy headed back to the shore to hunt. Horn full of magic. Body full of poison. Weirdest dating profile in any world, and still no matches.